Naomi Osaka by Ben Rothenberg

Author:Ben Rothenberg [Rothenberg, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2024-01-09T00:00:00+00:00

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As the sage Mary Carillo often says, the toughest thing in tennis is to “come back from ahead.” To have had a lead and lost it, ceding scoreboard advantage and momentum while accruing disappointment and regret, can be the toughest situation in a tennis match.

From late in the second set to early in the third set Kvitová won twelve points in a row. Naomi needed to find a way to dig back into the match, to stop the landslide from sweeping her away completely after she had been so close to the pinnacle of the sport. “Of course I felt very disappointed and sad when I had those three match points, and I tried to tell myself there’s nothing I can do about it, but you always have these doubts,” Naomi said after the match. “I just told myself that it’s a final and I’m playing against Petra—she’s a really great champion—so I have to keep fighting. I can’t let myself act immature, in a way. I should be grateful to be here. So that’s what I tried to do.”

Naomi turned it around, not by doing more but by doing less. To stop herself from boiling over, she dialed down her emotions as simply as if turning the knob on a stove. After the match, Naomi said she had been able to “dissociate [her] feelings.” “You know how some people get worked up about things?” she said. “That’s a very human thing to do. Sometimes I feel like I don’t want to waste my energy doing stuff like that. I think about this on the court, too. Like in the third set of my match today, I literally just tried to turn off all my feelings. So that’s why I wasn’t yelling as much in the third set.”

There was something almost machinelike about Naomi with her feelings turned off, she admitted. “I just felt kind of hollow, like I was a robot, sort of,” Naomi said later. “I was just executing my orders. I don’t know. Like, I just did what I’ve been practicing my whole life in a way. I didn’t waste any energy reacting too much.” Naomi said that the experience of switching into power-saver mode had felt like an out-of-body experience at times. “I do realize that I’m the one that made all those shots and it was like the decision making on my part,” Naomi said the next day. “But at the same time it feels—I don’t know—like I was just watching myself from a computer, in a way.”

It was easily noticed by those watching in the arena, too. “She shows emotions but right now Osaka is like a poker player: stone-faced,” Chris Fowler said on ESPN. Naomi’s new quiet, stealth mode was lethal on the court: she held for 1–1 to stop Kvitová’s run of five straight games, then broke for a 2–1 lead, then held again for 3–1. When Naomi couldn’t convert three break points at 4–2, she wasn’t rattled; she held to love in the next game to extend her lead to 5–3.

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